Chromium! (pics)

So, in case you haven't noticed, Google's pitch into the OS business has just provided its first fruits.

Chromium is here.

So, for anyone who cares, here's a detailed review of my romp into Chrome-land.

I'm using a virtual machine, as the OS is not currently confirmed as hardware ready, so as far as system requirements I'm shooting in the dark. None have been released.

But no deterrent. I hooked up a basic VM with 1 gig of ram, 32 megs of video memory and 3d acceleration, and though there is some slight lagging, overall it works superbly.

Okay so here we have my first taste of chromium.




Not bad. A nice, bare log on screen. Some sweet bevels on the corners. I would think this would be changed in the future though, so this may not be the actual release logon screen.

Alright, now I put in my username (at the moment I am using a generic name, but in the future any @gmail.com account will work)... and after a blank screen I am treated to this:

Essentially Chrome, but with a snazzy new icon in the corner. Oddly, Google calendar is the first thing to show up. I would think that the inbox or maybe a welcome page would show, but no luck.
It might be interesting to note the lack of any start/task/menubars. The closest thing you could get would be the bar at the top of the screen, but other than that new icon and the status indicators, it's pretty barebones.

In case you're wondering, here's a close up.

A clock, 'plugged in' notification, wifi indicator, and a dropdown menu that... does nothing different than if I just right clicked on a tab. Huh. Google is weird.

The browsing experience is a complete copy of Chrome, no surprises there, but the main difference is that other little icon on the left. This one.

By clicking on that you are sent to a page of 'apps', little web things mostly. All your basic email providers are there, as well as some shortcuts to .swf pages. I fail to see why shortcuts to flash games instead of installations of real games is anything too revolutionary, but nonetheless it's an interesting move. Here's the page.

I like the slightly angled pointer icon. It's a cool little touch to the OS.
Compared to other 'lightweight' OSs, Chromium seems to hog a bit of memory. Granted, the entire OS is about 260 megabytes, but the resources it requires far exceed those of say, Puppy Linux or the DSL.

Moving back to what it does, however, it seems somewhat limited. The actual OS does little, it's more focused on web apps and online resources. Google Docs is its office program, Gmail is the email, and flash games are your entertainment.

It's obviously designed with netbooks in mind, in other words. Small, lightweight, and barebones.

In case anyone is wondering, here's what the Options menu looks like, with what appears to be a GTK+ theme. I assume this will be changed to match Chrome by full release.


Apparently, Chromium also has Windowed Browsing, but without windows. It looks kind of like this.
You enter the URL up top in that text bar, and then you browse between windows with the arrows. Kind of clunky interface imho, but maybe they'll change that by final release. I guess that's Chromium's answer to workspaces.

Also, here's a task manager that I didn't notice before. You can find it by that little drop down menu on the top right.
You can't end the process for the browser, but other than that it's the same as any other task manager.

if you click on that 'stats for nerds' link on the bottom it returns you to chrome and you see this:

Interesting setup. I've never used a netbook-specific OS before, but I could get used to one, I would think.

So that's about it. There might be a follow-up blog to this if something interesting shows up, but this is a pretty big post for right now.

In conclusion, it's pretty good. Not amazing, and definitely flawed, but the idea is solid and the implementation is very well on it's way to completion. I would urge you to download it here and check it out if you want. It's totally free and legal, so no problems there.

And in case anyone is wondering, the program I used for all the screenshots here (and that I highly recommend) is called MWSnap and the virtualization software I used was Sun Virtualbox. Both are free and great programs to boot.